January 6, 2003
CYBERCOLUMN:
Piece by Piece
___By Donna Van Cleve
___The quilt had been pieced with some of the prettiest and ugliest material I had ever seen—wild orange, black and yellow patterned fabric right out of the ’60s; dainty prints of all sizes and colors of flowers; polka dots and soft plaids; solid pieces of mint green, royal blue, khaki, lavender, gold, orange, black, pink, yellow, red and gray; and a plaid of primary colors. And it was my quilt.
___My great grandmother Mamo had piecedthis quilt top using hundreds of small hexagons. She began with one orange hexagon in the middle and surrounded it with hexagons of a different fabric, along with an extra one on each end to make a diamond-shaped band. Each band of hexagons was a different fabric, so it looked like they were all radiating from the center.
Donna Van Cleve
___This quilt top, along with a couple of dozen others, had been pieced years ago when no piece of fabric was wasted. One of the quilt tops was made of postage stamp-sized pieces of material. Granny told me they would even wash the tiny tobacco pouches, take the stitches out and press them to be used in quilts. Flower sacks were a common source of fabric for new clothes, and all the scraps were used for quilts.
___In the years before my grandmother passed away, she and my mother quilted all the quilt tops that had been pieced by my grandmother and great grandmother many years before. Mom and Granny quilted enough quilts so each of the children and grandchildren would have one. What precious keepsakes they are to us now that Granny's no longer with us.
___When the time came to quilt the wild-colored hexagon quilt top Mamo had made, Mom asked me what color of backing I wanted to have with all those colors. Normally unbleached cotton muslin is used, but for some reason I didn't think this quilt fit the usual protocol. I ended up choosing black, which seemed to frame it.
___After I had the finished quilt in my home for several years, I began to realize that Mamo really hadn't been senile when she put it together. There was a rhyme and reason to it, although not so obvious at first glance.
___She alternated the bands with a solid and a print, and each print had a bit of the color of the solids on each side of it. It must have taken her some time to work this out—she used 25 kinds of fabric for the 25 diamond bands radiating out from the middle—from as little as the one orange hexagon in the center to 96 hexagons cut from different fabrics in each of the six longest diamond bands in the quilt. I didn't realize it until I counted them, but it took over 1,600 hexagons to make this quilt top. I think I would've given up before I started if I kept thinking about how many pieces it would take to finish it. But I imagine Mamo concentrated on one piece at a time instead of the whole, and she eventually completed it.
___I actually quilted a corner of this quilt myself, which meant four generations worked on it. That's very special to me. And even though Mamo used some pretty ugly pieces of fabric in this quilt, the finished product as a whole is a beautiful work of art that I am so proud of.
___God also has a way of taking the pieces of our own lives—the pretty as well as the ugly—and making something beautiful out of it if we let him. That's the key. Usually, we decide to let him work on us only after we've made a mess of it ourselves and gone all to pieces about something. Then we're ready to hand him our scraps to fix.
___God has a unique design and plan for each of our lives. It may not be so obvious at first, and it takes some time and effort on our part, too, but the result is worth it. We may think the process is overwhelming at times, but if we concentrate on one piece at a time instead of the whole, God will make something beautiful out of our lives.
___Donna Van Cleve is a writer and wife of one, mother of two, and grandmother of Audrie, and is a new member of Great Hills Baptist Church in Austin.
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